Lawful Evil is a role-playing session presented as a performance art installation; I'm one of the GMs who will be restaging it at the Big Reality show at the 319 Scholes gallery in Brooklyn on March 17, 2012. Curator Brian Droitcour wrote in the Rhizome essay that led to this exhibit:
Brody Condon also focused on the gamer’s engagement with rules and
expectations of character behavior in his project Lawful Evil, a
staged game of D&D at the Art LA Fair in 2007. Since its first
edition, D&D has prompted players to choose one of nine alignments
when creating characters, a kind of moral code that determines certain
boundaries of what the character is willing to do. Neutral good and
chaotic good are the most common choices, the vigilante alignments
that mean a character is willing to do almost anything in pursuit of
some righteous ultimate goal. A lawful evil character “cares about
tradition, loyalty, and order, but not about freedom, dignity, or
life,” according to the third edition of the D&D player’s handbook.
“He condemns others not according to their actions but according to
race, religion, homeland, or social rank.” That sounds familiar
enough, but it’s not a viewpoint that many people would willingly
associate with or deliberately choose to perform. Lawful Evil enhanced
meta-game thinking to magnify the relationship between medium and
gamer.
I think the piece is a Marcel Duchamp-style conceptual jape because:
- Condon's description says that the game played was Dungeons & Dragons
but contemporary accounts report that he and Ryan O'Toole used Hackmaster, which is arguably a prop for performance art in which participants pretend to be gamers at a roleplaying session
- Condon is savvy enough to know that saying only "the instructions for
staging this perfomance art are to have D&D players roleplay lawful
evil characters" is like saying "the instructions for this symphony
are to have the orchestra play in a minor key". I like to believe he's calling attention
to the kinds of skilled performance that do or don't get called art, and the
kinds of craft that go into running an event that are or aren't
valued.